Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones

I shrug.

Skeetah straightens up with a large stick in his hand, a branch knocked loose by a rainstorm, and begins beating the blanket. Dirt showers down, fitful as cold rain. Some of it floats a little longer than it should, a slow cloud, and I realize that some of China is in the blanket, that her hair is coming away. It makes me think of cereal in milk, of Rice Krispies in sugar.

“We need more food,” I say.

Randall catches his ball, hugs it to his stomach.

“Any ideas?”

I suck my lips. Feel like chewing something.

“Not yet,” I say.

Randall frowns. Junior lays his head on my shoulder.

“I’m tired,” he says.

I want to say, It’s too hot for you to be hanging on me , but I look at his baseball knees, his head, which seems too big and heavy for his stringy neck, and instead I say, “Do you want some noodles?”

“Yeah.”

Skeetah is frowning, beating the blanket clean. China starts from her crouch where she has been sitting next to the bucket, running from the first dig of her toes into the dirt. She runs up to the pilings that were the chicken coop and leaps, grinning, barking. She is trying to lick their feathers. The chickens bear down, huddle. China flies past, turns to the fence posts, jumps there, almost meeting them with her head. They squawk and hop, alight again on the wood. She ignores the dozen in the tree and races for the washing machine. She flies and lands on it, and the chickens roosting there scatter.

“Skeet!” I yell.

“China,” Skeet calls and hits the blanket again.

I go into the dark house to cook Junior’s noodles, and Daddy sleeps so hard and is so quiet that it feels like I am alone there.

“We should look for eggs,” says Randall. He says this while Junior is sitting on the steps, his face buried in the bowl, slurping at the soupy water left after he has sucked the ramen in long wormy strings over his chin and into his lips. He hates when I break the noodles before I boil them in the pot.

“They need to be in the refrigerator.”

“We can boil them. They’ll keep for days.”

Junior is drinking the last of the soup, still hunched over the bowl. I wish I’d made myself some; my tongue turns loose at the idea of the salt. Junior’s back is a young turtle’s shell, so thin it would snap if stepped on.

Skeetah is piling the folded blanket on top of the food bags along with the leashes and China’s practice tires and the syringes and the medicine he stole from the farmer. Junior sticks his finger into the bowl, wipes it along the bottom to get the seasoning, and licks it. He bangs into the kitchen, throws the bowl into the sink, and bangs back out. He runs over to Randall, the soles of his feet flashing yellow, the color of China’s eyes.

“You should put some shoes on,” I say.

“You coming, Skeet?” he asks as Randall slides from the gas tank, upright, already squinting into the woods, the dust, the wind.

“I’ll catch up. Gotta exercise China. She going to be cooped up, and she ain’t going to like it.”

Randall shakes his head and walks around the washing machine, the lawn mower, the old broken RV like he is finding his way through a maze. The chickens cluck at him, ruffle and settle their feathers against the pushing air as he passes. I am hungry.

“We could use more eyes,” I say. “Mama taught you how to do it, too, and you know Junior don’t know how to spot them yet.”

“In a minute.” Skeetah shrugs. China, at his knee, lets her head fall to the side, tongue out, as if it is the first time she’s ever seen me. Her ears fold over like napkins.

I sigh, don’t even know if he can hear it over the wind, and follow Randall into the detritus of the yard to hunt. The wind pushes against me so hard that I imagine it is the wind Medea called up after she slew her brother, to push the boat so quickly that the wake was a bloody froth; I barely have the energy to walk, to push back. On mornings like this when I am hungry, the nausea is always worse. There is the sound of China’s scrambling against Skeetah, of the tin shed shaking, of him laughing and China barking, but I leave them to it behind me and keep my eyes on the ground.

The chickens have made their own plans for the storm; they have packed their eggs away, hidden them well. As Randall and Junior and I spread out underneath the oaks and the pines, hunting, Randall crouches down to Junior, and he tells him how Mama taught us to find eggs. Look but don’t look , she said. They’ll find you. You gotta wander and they’ll come. She’d leaned over like Randall, her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog. They’re usually brown and have some feathers stuck to them , she’d say, pointing. The eggs look that way because of the mama. Whatever color the mama is, that’s what color the egg is . Her lips were pink, and when she leaned over like that I could smell baby powder drifting from the front of her dress, see the mole-marked skin of her chest, the soft fall of her breasts down into her bra. Like me and you , she said. Like me and you . See? She smiled at me, and her eyelashes met her eyelashes like a Venus flytrap. Her thick arm would rub against mine, and I would follow her pointing, and there would be a whole treasure of eggs, nestled one against the other: cream and white and brown and dark brown and speckled so that they almost looked black. The hens would lurk, murmuring. The cock, he always running off being a bully , she said . But the mama, the mama always here. See?

The pines shrug in a sky that covers like a wet T-shirt. Below, Randall fills Junior’s shirt with eggs that they gather from the most difficult places, places that only Junior, with his pin fingers, can reach: in the elbows of the dump truck’s engine, between the bottom of an old stinking refrigerator and the earth, wedged into the coils of a mattress chewed bare by animals. I search and find nothing.

The eggs in the front of Junior’s shirt are warm; they pull the front of the neck down to a V, and where his collarbones meet, it looks like two marbles against the skin. I set the eggs in the black pebbled pot that Mama used to cook gumbo in, count them as they roll and settle. Randall holds the sides of Junior’s shirt because Junior seems to be bending to the roll of the eggs. Twenty-four. There are twenty-four eggs to boil, to save, to eat. They are something.

When Manny appears, there is no sun to reach out its hand, to stroke him like a dog, to make him blaze and shine. He does not burn, but still there is something about him that glows, like a fire that is dying and the heat lives in the ashes, plain. I see him first because I am sitting on the steps. Junior’s and Randall’s backs are to him as they place the eggs in the pot. When Manny sees me looking at him, he catches on the secret mid-walk, like it’s a untied shoestring, and his eyes go wide, whiter in his face. But he keeps walking, becoming larger and more real in the gloom and wind and shaking green of the day until his footsteps are louder than the insects, which quiet one by one as if he is the coming storm. Where do they go? I think, and he is looking at Randall’s back, not my eyes, and I hate him, and I wonder if I will ever stop loving him.

“Cuz,” he says.

Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.

“Shit,” Randall says and turns.

“Sorry.” Manny’s shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”